Polkadot Sofia Meetup #02 – Recent Development

Dear blockchain fellows, with the kick off of the new year we continue our tradition to deliver interesting, informative and pragmatic content to all of you. Our goal to showcase innovative blockchain technologies led us to the 2nd special Polkadot Sofia meetup that happened earlier this week (21.01.2019). We were honored to have Ivo from AdEx walking us through their Polkadot Substrate implementation.

For those of you who were not with us at the event, I’d like to share with you some details.

In the first part we discussed Polkadot’s past, present and future development and then we left the stage to Ivo to show us more about his work in code.

Past

To get to know what really Polkadot is doing and what it is trying to achieve we collected some data. And as we can see the team has come a long way in a very short period of time. In only thirteen months the team managed to deliver over 68,000 lines of core code and more than 100k lines altogether. They have launched several testnets each of them to support and test all new features.

Present

Currently the team has been working on 1.0 beta of the third generation of blockchain technology stack, Substate. Another cool thing that Polkdot’s team has been working on is the release of “Alexander” test net. The team is considering this their third major milestone. “Alexander” test net is important because it’s going to feature the audit-ready GRANDPA finalization algorithm, an overhaul to the cryptography and further improved governance logic including lock-voting and delayed-enactment.

Future

With all the previous development the team is already ahead of schedule but nevertheless there is one more key milestone to reach:

ICMP or, to the uninitiated, Inter-Chain Message Passing. scheduled to happen over the first three months of 2019, with a test net incorporating it, scheduled to be launched in April.

Simultaneously, the team has been finalising the “nominated proof-of-stake” scheme and building in parachain consensus into Substrate, allowing Substrate chains to plug in to the global blockchain network that is Polkadot.

After this is done and the key features are implemented, there’s going to be a period of around six months of extensive testing before we can see the launch of Polkadot 1.0. Uhhuu, Exciting future for blockchain technology.

After learning a bit more about the project and its goals we had to see some code, to understand it’s full power. We had the pleasure to have Ivo to show us what they have been building at AdEx.

For those of you who didn’t managed to attend, video recording will be uploaded soon.

You can watch the video recording here:

Useful links

• Polkadot website
• Polkadot wiki
• AdEx
• Polkadot Sofia
• Blockchain Developers Meetup

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Also published on Medium.